14-Year Old Alacritech Changes Its Business Model

Alacritech unveils a Network Acceleration appliance that improves the performance of storage infrastructures while substantially mitigating Network Attached Storage (NAS) sprawl in today‘s enterprise.

The ANX 1500 represents the first NFS Acceleration appliance from Alacritech, which was established by Larry Boucher, a NAS pioneer, author of the SCSI standard and founder of both Adaptec and Auspex. The company holds 54 patents in network storage acceleration, and its foundation NFS Bridge technology is the key to the ANX 1500‘s outstanding price/performance. Alacritech has attracted $34 million in venture capital from top venture capital firms, including Alloy Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Redpoint Ventures and has realized significant IP licensing revenue that largely funded ANX 1500 development.

Despite long and grinding worldwide economic setbacks, one trend at enterprises has never stopped growing – the explosive proliferation of unstructured data. Advances in this rich data, through the growth of video, seismic, genomic, and design files have placed even more pressure on IT staff to manage and protect data while continuing to meet or exceed user expectations for performance, specifically for speed. Networked Attached Storage, or NAS, has responded to the challenge of managing and protecting file data, but has fallen far short of delivering manageable and affordable performance. This has created a vicious cycle in which the accumulation of data requires additional storage and access, resulting in the less effective use of storage, more complexity and greater cost.

The ANX 1500 is an NFS Throughput Acceleration appliance that addresses this issue through its patented NFS Bridge data caching technology. The ANX 1500 accelerates the performance of an existing storage network without requiring enterprises to replace their existing infrastructure or surrender ownership of mission-critical data. The product provides the lowest cost per operations per second (OPS). For example, a single ANX 1500, with 4TB of SSDs, can deliver 120,000 NFS operations per second for $110,000 and require 1/5 of the NAS infrastructure otherwise required to deliver the comparable NFS OPS performance. Most environments using the ANX 1500 will note substantially improved response times regardless of their NAS investment.

"Large, unstructured file growth has taken the current enterprise storage environment to the precipice of inefficiency," said Boucher, CEO of Alacritech. "Until now, companies have been cobbling together solutions that require more and more drives, yet result in unpredictable and poor performance, greater complexity, increased latency and reduced control. They also risk data loss, have to turn ownership of their data over to outsiders, and in the end, pay more for their trouble. We saw an opportunity to change ‘business as usual‘. We didn‘t limit ourselves to conventional thinking, and as a result we were able to accomplish the most important objectives of all – deliver unmatched price/performance, while eliminating NAS sprawl."

The ANX 1500 delivers:

• The lowest cost per OPS, taking into account the current NAS investment in place, by significantly reducing costs in the area of capital, power, cooling and rack space;
• Increased throughput, higher NFS OPS resulting in improved application performance;
• Increased speed of data access and lower response times;
• The product does this while maintaining the integrity of each enterprise‘s existing storage infrastructure.

"The ANX 1500 is an evolutionary advancement of Alacritech‘s long standing leadership in protocol acceleration, which is now applied not just to protocols, but to the optimization of all storage system interactions," said Jeff Boles, a technology analyst with Taneja Group. "The ANX 1500 substantially augments the performance of existing NAS investments from the best place possible – from right in the customer‘s Ethernet network – without reconfiguration or changes in management for the existing infrastructure. We think Alacritech is setting the stage for a next generation of solutions that will accelerate storage from outside the storage array, and more cost effectively share an investment in performance across many storage systems and clients. I‘ve talked to early-stage customers using the product, and they believe it‘s game-changing."

The ANX 1500 creates an accelerated performance layer that optimizes NAS performance by generating high NFS OPS, resulting in fewer IOPS required from the NAS it supports. The appliance accelerates responses to client NFS requests, lowering application response time for users. It does this by intelligently distinguishing between front-end sharable performance cache and back-end intelligent NAS. This results in the fastest retrieval of the most active/used data via cache. The appliance allows enterprises to use 80 percent of their disk space, versus the current standard of 20 percent in performance environments.

"Our testing to date confirms that metadata caching performance on the Alacritech ANX 1500 is quite powerful," said Steve Kowalski, Executive Director of Systems Engineering at Sony Imageworks. "Based upon our results, the ANX 1500 has the potential to open up both new and interesting economies of scale," concluded Kowalski.

The Alacritech ANX 1500 is currently being used by five Fortune 1000 companies for testing prior to launch. Pricing starts at $70,000.